U.S. History has certainly placed slavery in a more seeable context, for me. That said, anti-white rhetoric is fucked up.
I feel like with all the slave movies and the consistently anti-white rhetoric being thrown around, it's easy to feel lost in the moment or feel antagonized. The idea of "white fragility," essentially states this: If you respond negatively to anything involving minorities, then this is simply a result of your innate racism as a white person. This is sort of damned if you do and damned if you don't. The claim essentially makes it impossible to form any sort of complaint involving anything regarding race.
That said, there's no denying how fucked up slavery was in Colonial America. And that the effects persisted through to the 1960s. It wasn't until then that "white America" actually began thinking, "Oh, Slavery was pretty fucked up, huh?" In tandem with the Civil Rights movement.
However, this also betrays the fundamental premise of humanity, if it's viewed in a vacuum. Africans sold Africans into European, Middle Eastern, and American slavery. Romans had slaves. Japanese internment camps with human experimentation on U.S. soldiers. Viking enslavement of Europeans. Mongolian enslaving. etc. etc. North African Moors stealing 1 million whites off the coast of Europe.
This is all to say, this was not a unique thing that whites specifically did to blacks. It was a human thing to enslave throughout most of history. That only changed very recently. And the reason for slavery changed very recently, too. It was never racially based, or even economically based, but more as a result of war. This was very true in Africa, where war chiefs would enslave the survivors of wars--granted, the level of depravity and shittiness didn't really meet the level of Colonial America.
In fact, this idea of "whiteness" didn't even exist until the 1800s. If you were to ask an Irishman--my ancestors--who had been the recipients of thousands of years of brutality at the hands of the English--whether they were "white", well, you'd be served with, "Um, no, I'm not white. Englishmen are white, and we are NOT them." Before then, this idea of "whiteness" was separated into groups: There were Germans, French, English, etc, etc. They were not combined into one singular race.
White racism and white superiority was a fundamentally systematic viewpoint that developed from the top down--rich, wealthy planters: plantation owners, this was like 1% of the white population--successfully developed to dissuade white indentured servants from fighting together with black slaves, as happened in several rebellions. In other words, the ideas of white supremacy were injected artificially into the white populace then blew out of proportion--even when only 1% of whites actually had huge plantations. And say 2% of whites actually owned slaves, because they were so expensive. $30,000 for one slave.
When America was first formed in the 16th century, it was even legally allowable for blacks to own their own slaves or marry white women. That was shocking, to me, because we're always fed this, "Slavery was always this horrible thing." It became horrid beyond words, but it didn't start out that way. Slaves could even buy out their contracts if they worked hard.
Anyway, I still feel a lot of rage towards the prevailing anti-white rhetoric revolved around "Critical Race Theory" which seems to be the dominant thinking pattern in academia, at the moment. But, I'm glad I took this history class, because it has certainly put things a bit more in perspective. Seeing an objective measure and seeing from both sides makes it a lot more tempered.
For those of you wondering what "Critical Race Theory" is: A shorthand is that you are not you, you are your race. In other words, if you are black, you are oppressed, even if you're a rich lawyer who grew up with doctor parents who went to Harvard. And if you are white, you are part of the problem and need to understand that it's your job to balance the equation of racial inequities--even if you were born in a trailer park and ate out of trash cans and begged to survive, like my mom.
The scary thing is that this is, legitimately, what is being taught in higher education--especially in Ivy League schools.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhRPlsa-Y-0]
That said, there's no denying how fucked up slavery was in Colonial America. And that the effects persisted through to the 1960s. It wasn't until then that "white America" actually began thinking, "Oh, Slavery was pretty fucked up, huh?" In tandem with the Civil Rights movement.
However, this also betrays the fundamental premise of humanity, if it's viewed in a vacuum. Africans sold Africans into European, Middle Eastern, and American slavery. Romans had slaves. Japanese internment camps with human experimentation on U.S. soldiers. Viking enslavement of Europeans. Mongolian enslaving. etc. etc. North African Moors stealing 1 million whites off the coast of Europe.
This is all to say, this was not a unique thing that whites specifically did to blacks. It was a human thing to enslave throughout most of history. That only changed very recently. And the reason for slavery changed very recently, too. It was never racially based, or even economically based, but more as a result of war. This was very true in Africa, where war chiefs would enslave the survivors of wars--granted, the level of depravity and shittiness didn't really meet the level of Colonial America.
In fact, this idea of "whiteness" didn't even exist until the 1800s. If you were to ask an Irishman--my ancestors--who had been the recipients of thousands of years of brutality at the hands of the English--whether they were "white", well, you'd be served with, "Um, no, I'm not white. Englishmen are white, and we are NOT them." Before then, this idea of "whiteness" was separated into groups: There were Germans, French, English, etc, etc. They were not combined into one singular race.
White racism and white superiority was a fundamentally systematic viewpoint that developed from the top down--rich, wealthy planters: plantation owners, this was like 1% of the white population--successfully developed to dissuade white indentured servants from fighting together with black slaves, as happened in several rebellions. In other words, the ideas of white supremacy were injected artificially into the white populace then blew out of proportion--even when only 1% of whites actually had huge plantations. And say 2% of whites actually owned slaves, because they were so expensive. $30,000 for one slave.
When America was first formed in the 16th century, it was even legally allowable for blacks to own their own slaves or marry white women. That was shocking, to me, because we're always fed this, "Slavery was always this horrible thing." It became horrid beyond words, but it didn't start out that way. Slaves could even buy out their contracts if they worked hard.
Anyway, I still feel a lot of rage towards the prevailing anti-white rhetoric revolved around "Critical Race Theory" which seems to be the dominant thinking pattern in academia, at the moment. But, I'm glad I took this history class, because it has certainly put things a bit more in perspective. Seeing an objective measure and seeing from both sides makes it a lot more tempered.
For those of you wondering what "Critical Race Theory" is: A shorthand is that you are not you, you are your race. In other words, if you are black, you are oppressed, even if you're a rich lawyer who grew up with doctor parents who went to Harvard. And if you are white, you are part of the problem and need to understand that it's your job to balance the equation of racial inequities--even if you were born in a trailer park and ate out of trash cans and begged to survive, like my mom.
The scary thing is that this is, legitimately, what is being taught in higher education--especially in Ivy League schools.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhRPlsa-Y-0]
